Look Into the Eyes of Ronald Reagan - Revisiting the Iranian Hostage Crisis

In recent years Tony Blair has been a man with very few foreign policy successes of any kind. But there was at least one. When British Marines were captured by Iranian forces in disputed waters in March this year, then held as prisoners and used as propaganda tools by the Iranian government, Blair quickly dropped his initial, threatening tone and followed a policy of cautious engagement that helped to diffuse tension and led quickly to their safe release. Perhaps not an outright success - more of a successful exercise in harm reduction.

During the crisis, the Bush administration offered Blair the assistance of US forces and a recommended list of military options which remain unknown to the public. Fortunately Blair declined, and told Washington to shut up, as the 'Guardian' reported:

In the first few days after the captives were seized and British diplomats were getting no news from Tehran on their whereabouts, Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do? They offered a series of military options, a list which remains top secret given the mounting risk of war between the US and Iran. But one of the options was for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran, to underline the seriousness of the situation.

The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf. … At the request of the British, the two US carrier groups, totaling 40 ships plus aircraft, modified their exercises to make them less confrontational.”

In under two weeks, the affair was resolved without war or deaths. The episode exposed the vulnerability of British forces in southern Iraq, but any observer who has been paying attention knew about that anyway.

Blair’s measured, life-saving approach was denounced by those who regard foreign policy only in terms of domination or submission. In their one-dimensional view of the world outside, they can either exact submission from other states through force or the threat of force, or we ourselves will be engaged in an act of craven submission to them.

In England, Conservative frontbencher Michael Gove counselled that the Iranians had been emboldened to seize the Marines after British troops began a partial withdrawal from Basra, thus displaying weakness. In the U.S., potential Republican presidential candidate and former petty tyrant of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, told an interviewer that the U.S. and Britain should immediately respond by bombing oil refineries and targeting civilian energy systems and transport in Iran. Just imagine where we would be now – and in the future - if this kind of advice were followed through to its logical conclusion. Gove apparently advocates maintaining a collapsing occupation, despised by the local population, indefinitely – because how can it be ended except by showing the weakness of the British position? Gingrich, and so many like him, advocate war – indeed war crimes - quickly and easily, without even the barest consideration of the most likely consequences.

The submission/domination view of foreign policy is sustained through a series of historical myths or, at best, a highly selective examination of the historical record. In Britain, this meme centres around such episodes as Margaret Thatcher’s resolution to defeat vastly weaker opponents at home – the IRA hunger strikers and impoverished miners - and, of course, the Munich Agreement of 1938 with Hitler, which has long since been used as a tortured analogy to justify everything from the refusal to negotiate with Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland to the abortive 1956 invasion of Egypt.

In the U.S., the myth-making focuses on such historical low points as Kennedy’s stand-off with Khrushchev, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80. During the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy quite consciously worked to create the myth that the Soviets had backed down in the face of his resolution, knowing that his political opponents would jump on him if they learned that he had actually reached a compromise with Moscow to dismantle U.S. missiles in Turkey in return for a removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The facts are well-known by now – but the self-serving legend of results from steely pig-headedness survives because of its recurring political utility.

In the case of the Iranian hostages, this has taken a curious form, combining malice and glurge. The recent debate among Republican presidential candidates in the Ronald Reagan Library was always going to witness obsequious homage to the late president but Rudy Giuliani’s short speech on matters Persian was something else. He described the end of the crisis on Reagan’s inauguration day like this:

Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan's eyes, and in two minutes they released the hostages.”

Trying to enter this fantasy takes some mental effort. Picture the Ayatollah Khomeini toying with President Jimmy Carter and laughing at him. Suddenly, newly-elected Reagan comes on the TV screen as the new president. The mocking mullahs wet themselves as they stare into his hard-man eyes and immediately agree to release all hostages, saying they are very sorry and won’t do it again and please be nice to us, Mr. Reagan, sir. That is the image Giuliani was presumably trying to get across. He is apparently quite serious, and no one else at the debate called him on it.

As usual, in the real world, something quite different happened. Giuliani’s fantasies of Oval Office machismo offer the United States no solutions to its security problems – just another round of bloody chaos.

For most of his presidency, Jimmy Carter took what might be called a tough policy on Iran, if you want to call supporting one of the world’s then most repressive dictatorships that. But the Shah and his notorious secret police, the SAVAK, backed to the hilt with US and British weaponry, were unable to retain power through murder and torture in the face of overwhelming popular opposition.

With the Shah overthrown, the most powerful group in the revolutionary coalition – the Shi’ite theocrats – started to manoeuvre and jail their way into controlling the new government. Popular feeling against the U.S. for supporting the Shah was strong, and in November 1979 a group of armed university students took over the US embassy in Tehran and held those inside as hostages. The more radical Islamists in the new regime supported them. The hostage-takers released 13 hostages – women and African-Americans (on the grounds they were an oppressed minority in the USA) while holding the other 52 for the next 444 days.

For Jimmy Carter, presiding over years of recession and high gas prices at home, the hostage crisis, like 9/11 for George W. Bush, came as a great big poll boost, giving him the opportunity to be a popular tough-guy president. But his initial, measured approach did not bring quick results.

Attacked from the Right for his supposed weakness he decided to take a more drastic course. He broke off diplomatic ties, ending direct talks with Iranian foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh - a regime moderate sympathetic to the hostages who pleaded with the White House to keep talking (Ghotbzadeh resigned – two years later, he would be executed). In April 1980, over the objection of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned in protest, Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a military raid to rescue the hostages.

Famously, Eagle Claw was a disaster. Equipment failures and sandstorms forced Carter to abort the mission without even engaging Iranian forces. Soon after the President had expressed relief that at least no Americans or Iranians had been killed, he learned that two of the aircraft had crashed with eight deaths. His poll ratings plummeted to an historical low, and the episode cost him the 1980 election. Carter had desperately opted for more machismo in his foreign policy – from huge increases in military spending to cutting off grain shipments to the Soviet Union as a protest against their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and beginning the Second Cold War – all in the vain hope of seeing off the Republican talking point that he was a weak, vacillating president. But it did him no good.

However, Carter continued to work ceaselessly for the release of the hostages. With the military option exhausted he had little choice but to use diplomatic channels, with the Jordanian regime acting as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran. The Iranian regime made a number of demands, ranging from a reasonable insistence on US non-intervention in their country to an unreasonable offer to return the hostages at a price of 24 billion dollars. Recognising the political fallout from paying such a colossal ransom, Carter had to reject demands of that sort, but he did not give up on negotiations, instead choosing to release Iranian assets in the US, billions of dollars of which he had ordered frozen in retaliation for the loss of the US embassy.

In his fine book on the moral disaster that was the Reagan administration, ‘Sleepwalking Through History’, journalist Haynes Johnson wrote of Carter that:

He had become obsessed with the hostages. He knew each of them by name, studied their careers and family backgrounds, read the personal letters they wrote from captivity, met with their wives and children, visited family members in their homes around the country, and came to hold for them, as he later wrote, ‘deep personal feelings that were almost overwhelming’”.

After losing the election to Reagan, Carter hoped desperately to salvage his reputation by bringing the hostages home before he left the White House. As inauguration day came closer, he became practically an insomniac – the hostages dominated his waking thoughts, and he stayed awake to have them. In the end he was reduced to hoping they might be released in the final minutes of his presidency.

On Inauguration Day itself, at 6:35 in the morning, Carter’s chief negotiator, Warren Christopher, rang him from Algiers to say that a deal with the Iranians had been concluded, with Iran being granted none of its major demands. The 52 remaining hostages were coming home.

This was all happening before the Iranians had a chance to be scared of Ronald Reagan in that two-minute window Giuliani told us about. Come to think of it - where was Ronald Reagan when the deal was struck? At 7:00am, Carter put a call through to Reagan to get him ready for the moment of their release. Carter was called back by an aide who said that the president-elect:

Had had a long night, was sleeping, and was not to be disturbed.”

You’re kidding,” Carter replied.

No, sir, I’m not,” the aide said.

Carter said he would call back. Reagan returned his call an hour and a half later.

Reagan joined Carter as he travelled from the White House to the Capitol. Carter was still on the phone, taking only calls about the hostages. Johnson describes the scene:

Carter thought Reagan affable but oddly incurious as the limousine bore them along Pennsylvania Avenue. Reagan cracked a few jokes but asked no questions about the hostages. There was nothing Reagan could do about them then anyway; they were still Carter’s problem, and Carter was still obviously dealing with it.”

Carter was informed that the hostages still had not taken off from Iran as the inauguration ceremonies began. His hopes of announcing their freedom as his last act as president were gone. Instead, they were finally released into US custody minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president. The Iranian regime had long decided to release the hostages but vindictively chose to humiliate Carter first.

But the deal to release the hostages was not concluded in those minutes after Carter's presidency – it was the result of months of intense efforts by his administration, and the damage done to Iran’s international reputation through its conduct. Carter tried the sorts of measures insisted on by his opportunistic Republican opponents and the only result was death and catastrophe. But patient brokering between diplomats finally did the job. At the crucial moment the deal was struck, the Iranian government was not staring fearfully into Reagan’s eyes – those eyes were shut tight as the new president slept off the previous night, refusing to be woken for the issue that won him the election.

References:

Americans offered “aggressive patrols” in Iranian airspace’, Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Michael Howard and John Hooper, the Guardian, April 7th, 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2051971,00.html

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release: Hostages of Iran, March 30, 2007

For a perfect example of the domination/submission worldview at its silliest:

http://studentofobjectivism.blogspot.com/2007/04/ayn-rand-institute-press-release.html

If Only Newt Gingrich Were President’, Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, April 4th, 2007

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/04/gingrich/index.html

California Republican Debate Transcript, MSNBC.com, May 3rd, 2007

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18478985/

The Desert One Debacle’, Mark Bowden, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, May 2006, p62-77

Sleepwalking Trough History – America in the Reagan Years’, Haynes Johnson, pp24-40